Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems

For nearly half a century, Jared Carter has been quietly mapping the American heartland. Line by line, his poetry has shown us the landscape, sounded the voices, conjured the music, and tested the silence of the ever-changing and yet ever-constant Midwest that figures so prominently in the American story. And yet what we find in Carter's poetry is endlessly new.

Here, in poems selected from his first five books, is the summer-long buzz of the cicada and the crack of the cue ball, the young...